You're all wrong and you all need to study what Glass and Reich have achieved in their chosen genre. No, I can't sit there and listen to it all on a regular basis. And there is plenty that could be called the Emperors New Clothes. But these guys more or less invented a style of music. I had to give all this stuff a listen once before embarking on a stylised version of their form of minimalism.You may not like it, but it's good at what it does.

I think this library sounds very good. Good luck to all the chaps at VSL. I just had quite a few old tracks I did some time ago using predominantly VSL App strings ect on the BBC, I was happy to see, and I think this library will take writers like me onto another sound quality level when the VSL Sync player gets sorted.

The main difference between film writers from the 1930s through to the early 1970s is the fundemental understanding of harmonic structure and the build up of an orchestral score.

Sometimes the score can be very sparce and effective, and sometimes it can be full blown and very effective.

There's an argument that these old style scoring methods are not relevent in the 21st century. Indeed, they probably haven't been relevent since the mid 1980s. John Williams actually revitalised the orchestra in the 1970s for a while. He was very influenced by classical works and did not mind borrowing from them. A lot of his scores were also influenced by army band music. Quite strident at times and very much 2/4 march time. What he really excelled at was the writing and use of memorable melodies.

Film producers liked memorable melodies way back. One of their less understandable tricks was to stick a song in a film, almost as if it came out of nowhere. It used to happen a lot more than you would think. It's a selling tool, just as later on, John William's melodies were always synonomous with the film. You hear the music, and you think of the film. Very profitable arrangement.

Into the 1990s and suddenly films were discovered by the ostinato. The ostinato seems at first to be a mild cold, but it soon infects every aspect of filmscore writing and you soon realise this a category 4 outbreak. The ostinato is about as easy a way of scoring as there probably is, next to plain and simple noise.

Plain and simple noise is mostly what you get today. Otherwise known as Sound Design.

So that's where we are today. Sound Design.

Sound Design in film and TV scores is just another way of saying you're an untrained, uncultured monkey that can't write music for shit. What???? I hear the cry.

Well if that's not the case, then fucking prove it.

I sat through a film recently at the cinema called Life. The entire film was awash with fucking noise from beginning to end. It is the worst irritant imaginable. The film was crap which didn't help. The only people that are immune from this illness are under the 25s.

What a great shame to hear of James Horner's death in an aeroplane accident. A Royal College of Music academic in the 1970s and later music study in the USA, he certainly came up with some memorable music.

I will always have a special fondness for his scores to Sneakers and The Name of the Rose.

You think these are angry posts? You should have seen the email I got from one of the posters this morning.

I only came here under fear and threat of death and destruction of what remains of our empire.

What I think people are saying here is try and be new. Try and be a bit more yourself and original. If you can't be original - be aboriginal.

Anything to stop these fearful, destructive, life threatening emails. And btw. Hans Z wouldn't want you to copy him or his sounds. If I find you copied Hans - I'm warning you now - I'm going to the Police.

Erik go to the Apple Store and I think you can buy Mountain Lion for about £14.

I agree with you Erik. Apple has turned itself into a fucking shambles.

The fact that Mavericks may or may not be better than ML according to different pople is neither here nor there. You should be able to access what you want, when you want, with ease and not be dictated to by anyone when you're the one that's paying.

Look - what you need to understand about elctronic keyboards is just ridiculous. I have been playing the damn things since the 1960s. First a Farfisa Combo then a Hammond L100 and then a Hammond B3 and onto a Moog in 1971 and then so on through the ages.

All these keyboards have one thing in common. They're actions are ALWAYS entirely different to the last one you had.

In short, it depends on how you play, what you want to play, what you want to put into the DAW and how fast you want to do it, basically how good you are at playing.

Over the years on the internet this question comes up time and again and it's impossible to give advice to people. I see people be very generous with their time and try, but to me it's a futile excercise. Its the same as saying to someone on the internet, THESE GOLF CLUBS ARE FANTASTIC!!! GET THEM. Without actually seeing the guy ever swing a club or knowing what his handicap is.

Bottom line probably is this when it comes to keyboards used for what we generally nowadays is this.

If you're just using an 88 for inputing notes into the DAW, then just about anything fairly good will do. As already mentioned, a second hand Yamaha, Kurzweil, Roland, etc should be good to go.

If you're interested in actually sitting there and playing when you're not inputing i.e. with the headphones directly into the back of the keyboard (could be just to play Bach or actually improvising for example) then go up a notch and get a good weighted action 88 second hand and go and see it first if at all possible.

I'm not really an expert, but I like to play around with this kind of thing on a weighted 88. It's just about quick enough and only really gets slow when playing stuff like Bach or Rachmaninoff.

You are supposed to spend 200 EU on a download and the comapny selling it can't even get out a set of videos that expalin it to NON FUCKING COMPUTER GEEKS!!!!! And that's a fucking download. Try doing that in a shop and see how far you get without the proper backup. You'd be in court faster than you could say jack sh!t.

And so what do we then get. The fucking inevitable. Some twat on the interent decides it's time to cash in @ $75 per hour for something that should be easy!!! AND Who the fucking hell wants to get buried in PAGE FUCKING 49 OF A PDF.

Apparently yes it is. The tutorial videos are singularly the worst tutorial videos on the whole internet regarding anything musical/computers. Apart from not actually explaining anything you will also go fucking blind.

I gave up on it after about 4 days and threw the fucking thing out of my computer.

Amadeus was a great film cinematically. And very entertaining. Hitcock quote - the audience will believe what I tell them. The music was great and very well performed - the opera scenes very well done, especially The Magic Flute - Queen of the Night part.

Shakespeare in Love was a fucking awful film. It was basically a Hollywood costume romcom for people who think they know something about English literature. I mean how the fuck can you hand out Oscars for that.

OK thanks for the try Daryl but I can't make head nor tail out of it and have deleted the program from the hard drive. I don't think I even need it. Just one computer should be sufficient for what I do.

That's a good question and I was on the phone to my music publisher when I spotted your message come up. So I asked if I should bother to link two computers together (which was part of the plan) - and yes I could and would be interested in doing that. Even though as you say I don't have anything like big templates. I thought I should at least give it a go.

The Kontakt screenshots. Yes I go into the Batch thing and do all of that.